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White Paper: Achieving Sustainable Business Growth with a Total Global Support Solution

IT and Support departments can now be viewed by the organization as contributing to revenue growth by the utilization of remote support.

Remote support increases revenue opportunities by:

• Improving the customer experience and creating measurable value for the customer and provider alike
• Serving as a powerful branding tool improving customer interaction with your brand
• Enabling fast-growth organizations to penetrate new markets
• Providing a dynamic opportunity to resolve customer issues and create an opportunity for up sells and retention

Click here to download the whitepaper to learn more about how remote support can help you...

NICE Systems Launches Quality Optimization
NICE Systems Ltd., a provider of advanced solutions that enable organizations to extract Insight from Interactions to drive performance, announced the launch of its Quality Optimization solution, a next-generation quality management solution for contact centers that is part of NICE SmartCenter. NICE's Quality Optimization solution is the first end-to-end quality management (QM) solution on the market to bridge the gap between organizations' existing QM processes and business objectives, such as First Call Resolution (FCR), handle time optimization, churn reduction and increased customer satisfaction.

Strapped Companies Looking to Get More From HR Technology
With cost control paramount and most HR budgets shrinking, employers are looking to make changes that will get the most from their HR technology, according to a forthcoming survey by Watson Wyatt, a leading global consulting firm.

Watson Wyatt's 2009 HR Technology Trends Survey found that 61 percent of employers are taking steps to optimize their current service delivery models (which includes their mix of HR technologies, call centers and vendors). A third (33 percent) are reviewing and updating all vendor contracts, and only 27 percent are staying the course. Watson Wyatt's survey was conducted in February and March 2009 and includes responses from 181 large employers.

When asked to rank the top three factors that would prevent changes being made to HR sourcing strategies, 43 percent of respondents cited transition costs as the most important, followed by the lack of a business case (31 percent) and avoiding disruption in current service (11 percent).

The survey also found that companies are using a variety of Web 2.0 technologies such as social networking (23 percent), podcasts (19 percent), blogs (21 percent) or wikis (15 percent) to communicate internally with their employees. For these companies, the level of satisfaction is high -- approximately three in five (59 percent) are satisfied with their use of podcasts, half (49 percent) are satisfied with their social networking technologies, and two out of five (40 percent) are satisfied with their use of blogs and wikis.
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Study Shows 95% of Companies Value High Quality Customer Experience
COPC Inc. (Customer Operations Performance Center Inc.) and SOCAP International (Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals) released results of their benchmarking study for customer care. The findings reveal detailed customer satisfaction data for the household/personal care, food/beverage, retail/consumer goods, pharmaceutical/ medical devices and travel/hospitality industries.

Of the companies surveyed, key findings reveal:

• 98% provide customer service and/or post sales support
• 80%-plus utilize more than one support type
• 21% don't measure customer satisfaction
• 24% measuring customer satisfaction do not consistently achieve defined performance targets
• 65% have an external customer service center
• 95% have a quality monitoring process
• 89% do not utilize offshore support sites
• 33% use "temporary" agents to reflect the degree of seasonality in their business

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Strong Leadership, Talent as Keys to Staying Ahead of the Competition
Employing good people is a company's best line of defense against the competition, a recent survey of chief financial officers (CFOs) suggests. More than half (55 percent) of executives interviewed said that having solid leadership and hiring outstanding talent are the best ways to protect against threats from rival firms. State-of-the-art technology is also viewed as a significant advantage, cited by 24 percent of respondents.

The survey was developed by Robert Half Finance & Accounting, the world's first and largest specialized financial recruitment service. It was conducted by an independent research firm and is based on interviews with more than 1,400 CFOs from a stratified random sample of U.S. companies with 20 or more employees.

CFOs were asked, "Which one of the following will best protect companies from competitive threats in the next three years?" Their responses:

• Strong company leadership -- 28%
• A focus on hiring the best people -- 27%
• Up-to-date technology -- 24%
• The ability to develop and implement new ideas quickly -- 9%
• Up-to-date competitive intelligence and market data --  6%
• Other -- 5%
• Don't know/no answer -- 1%

More...

IT Management Students Aiming for Boardroom, Poll Reveals
Students of the IT Management for Business (ITMB) degree have big ambitions for their future IT careers. In a survey commissioned by leading software provider CA and e-skills UK, 80% of those who took part said they would like to become chief information officers, chief executives or

The international nature of technology holds great appeal. More than a quarter of students - 28% of men and 27% of women - are hoping to spend time working in mainland Europe; while 25% of males set their sights on North America and 15% of females are interested in experience in Asia or Australia.

Students are also attracted by the business relevance of technology. Among their top five aspirations, 90% of students want to solve business problems with IT, 89% want to help make businesses more efficient, and 78% want to use IT to increase innovation.

The students were very positive about the skills and knowledge they were developing as part of their degree: 72% are "confident or very confident" of getting a job after they graduate.

When questioned on communication preferences, just 0.5% of respondents showed a liking for the Twitter social networking and micro-blogging service, while 33% identified email as a firm favorite, followed by the humble phone at 20% and Facebook at 19%.

Key findings include:

• 80% of ITMB Students Want CIO and CEO Posts
• 90% are Hoping to Spend Time Abroad
• 72% are "Confident or Very Confident" of Getting a Job

http://www.e-skills.com/

White Paper: Using Web-based Support Tools to Improve Customer Service

The web has given voice to every kind of business and end user, as they take to social networks, blogs, wikis, video-sharing, virtual reality worlds and tweets in growing numbers. This level of communication has dramatically changed the way business gets conducted, to the joy of many high-profile companies who have leveraged it to great fortune. But to the horror of some businesses, the voices directed at them are harshly revelatory: they're bringing to light broken business practices, service faux pas, product malfunctions, and corporate malfeasance.

Indeed, each web visit presents the business with the opportunity to impress and influence existing and potential customers. This new white paper from SupportIndustry.com examines the latest trends and technologies in using Web-based support tools to improve customer service.

To Coach or Not to Coach? That is the Question
With all the uncertainty out there, there is someone who you can count on, and that person is you. And when this time in our history passes -- which it will -- you (and I) will still be here and who we are and how we handle ourselves will get us through.I believe this is the time to take great care of yourself, of your teams, your co-workers, your peers, your customers, and your family. It is a great time to find a coach, someone who is your mentor, your cheer leader, who pushes you out of your comfort zone and supports you in reaching or surpassing your goals.
Full Article...

Think before you fire: The cost of replacing IT talent
There's currently a certain sense of deja-vu within the IT community, as companies look at shaving even more cost out of a function that has been battered since the 2001 dot-com bust. However, when we look at the lessons of the past, you do have to question companies which decide to sharpen their knives once more when they address their IT costs. Companies need to offset the cost of every layoff with the cost of replacing that talent when the economy improves. It is not so much who is left standing, but rather who is in position to grasp the brass ring of prosperity when it returns.
Full Article...

A Star is Saved: A Five-Point Plan for Retaining Your Best People
Saving our star performers takes a solid plan and lots of time and attention to proven people practices.
Full Article...

Service Level Targets: One Size Does Not Fit All
Debates have been raging in the contact center world for years on the definition of whether there is -- or should be -- an industry standard for service level targets. While some propose a "gold standard" in setting service level targets, others state that service levels must be established based on specific business needs and customer requirements.
Full Article...

7 Tips for Keeping the Right Personnel
With IT budgets frozen or pared back, you need to handle any staff reductions carefully to ensure that you hold onto your best engineers and managers. This article takes an in-depth look at this topic.
Full Article...

Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life
by Winifred Gallagher

Rapt, acclaimed behavioral science writer Winifred Gallagher makes the radical argument that the quality of your life largely depends on what you choose to pay attention to and how you choose to do it. Gallagher grapples with provocative questions -- Can we train our focus? What’s different about the way creative people pay attention? Why do we often zero in on the wrong factors when making big decisions, like where to move? -- driving us to reconsider what we think we know about attention.

For more information, or to order your copy...

More books can be found in the RecognizeServiceExcellence.com Required Reading section: http://www.recognizeserviceexcellence.com

White Paper: Best Practices for Coaching Your Support Team to Handle Anything

This white paper provides a step-by-step game plan for solving your support agents' worst nightmares, based on the author's experience in successfully "turning around" support performance, as well as current research in the psychology of how we communicate with people. In the process, you will learn how specific, procedural skills -- both for how your agents respond to customers, and how you coach your team -- can change everything about how your interact with customers, in a way that will impact both your support metrics and your bottom line.

Get the full white paper here!

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